Strange Mutants was an interesting listen. I enjoy the different stories from the U.S. and around the world of sightings of the Yeti, Bigfoot, Mothman, UFO's, demon dogs, vampire bats and other strange creatures. Disappearing cattle, flying snakes, and other elusive animals make for great listening. I love the subject therefore I can never get enough of the stories.
I watch TV shows with similar content and there has been legendary sightings and some proven evidence. I grew up with the story of the Goatman and the Aurora incident so nope, these stories never get old.
I enjoy John Keel's work. I find it all fascinating and sometimes a bit frightening. There are too many claims for there not to be something out there. This would be great to listen to on a camping trip also.
Jack Chekijian does an excellent job with Keel's work. I like his narrating style and I always look forward to him voicing these audiobooks. Another great job!
Audiobook gifted for unbiased review. 1892062372 In Strange Creatures From Time and Space, Keel collects accounts of bigfoots, sea monsters, UFOs, and other Fortean creatures and events, including a bit about the phenomenon he's most closely associated with, West Virginia's mothman. The format, style, and even humor of the book are very similar to Charles Fort's work, but Keel does begin to develop his distinction between real, flesh-and-blood creatures and beings that are not necessarily real in the usual sense of the word. Since it was written in 1970, some of the individual encounters and phenomena Keel covers are well-known or have long been explained or debunked, but there are also lots of reports (usually representative of a particular type of encounter) that were new to me. Overall, the book (mainly because of its format) isn't as good a read as The Mothman Prophecies, but it is an interesting piece of Fortean history. 1892062372 Where does Keel get all this info? Like, his data on hairy humanoid sightings in the US seems contradictory to what I would think - like a high number of such sightings were of long-armed, knuckle-dragging type. I thought HH sightings were pretty much all uprights. This is one of the things that make me wonder where his data comes from.
If you want to explore any and every weird thing that anybody has claimed to have seen, this is a hefty resource. 1892062372 The Good - A lot of info packed between the covers.
The Bad - Tiny print and the comic book cover.
The Ugly - Mothman!
http://www.johnkeel.com/?p=246
Link to the photo mentioned on page 30.
Looks like a man in a fur coat to me.
;) 1892062372 I received this audio book as a gift in exchange for a honest and unbiased review. This book is about the odd, strange creature reports through the last one hundred years. From big foot to aliens, it's all there. I enjoyed listening to this narration of this book. Some of it had me shaking my head at human behavior and some had me saying Oh My!. I would hope that now we have evolved enough that should we come upon a creature we don't know or understand, that we would approach it with kindness, not shoot first and ask questions later.
The author, John A Keel had his work cut out for him with all the research for this book. It is well written though not always exciting. The narrator, Jack Chekijian as always does a great job delivering the material to us flawlessly. 1892062372
John A. Keel á 4 Read
AUTHOR JOHN KEEL'S MOTHMAN PROPHECIES TAKES TO THE BIG SCREEN STARRING RICHARD GERE
John Keel is America's number one paranormal investigator. Recently his MOTHMAN PROPHECIES was made into a major motion picture starring Richard Gere. And his work on the winged creatures has just been re released.
STRANGE MUTANTS was first published in l982 and is a slightly condensed version of the out of print CREATURES FROM TIME AND SPACE that fans had clammered for.
We thought this book was out of print until we recenly found several cartons hidden in the back of our warehouse an have decided to make it available once again.
Says Keel: No matter where you live, someone within two hundred miles of your home has had a direct confrontation with a frightening apparition o inexplicable monster...There is a chance - a very good on - that sometime in the next few years you will actually come face to face with a giant hair-covered humanoid or a little man with bulgin eyes, surrounded by aghostly greenish glow.
There are three chapters on the winged flying beings...including one on the monster of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Other chapters include:
O Ambling Nightmares.
O The Uglies and the Nasties.
O Giants in the Earth.
O Those Silly Flying Saucer People.
O The Grinning Man.
O Cattle Rustlers From The Skies.
O The Incomprehensibles.
O Big Feet and Little Brains.
Adds Keel: We now know that our little planet is infested with remarkable animals an insects that defy common sense. . .
Strange MutantsIt's a kind of tautology to point out strange things about a Strange Creatures book. This man was a journalist with a lot of practice writing exposition. It's hilarious how much honor he says journalists have. But he 1) is very satisfied that bounties killed the last wild wolves in parts of the U.S. 2) Takes UFOlists to task for not being open to every alleged sighting in history. In tandem to reading about the apparent extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger, his obsession with strange creatures sounds a bit like hunter's bloodlust.
A catalogue listing strange sightings fills the second half of the book. For its stated intentions, the book is probably more than complete in its own strange little world. 1892062372 I really enjoyed this as an ebook and will be ordering the paperback as well. Although I've read a lot on the subject, this book has so many sightings that are new to me. I expected to read more about cryptids than ufos, but a big part of the book is devoted to the alien subject. My complaints are that the book does not have pictures :( not even a sketch or anything, and that it is very disorganized. In this way, it does not function well as a guide because it seems nearly impossible to find specific stories buried in with several others in the endless narrative of mysterious things. Still this book packs a punch in the sheer amount of info and for that it gets 5 stars from me. 1892062372 It will probably strike some as odd that I would be reviewing a 47 year-old book on paranormal phenomena, but the explanation is pretty simple. THIS is the book that got me interested in esoterica back when I was but a youngster. My older brother had left this little paperback tome behind when he left for college, and I was fascinated by the cool cover art by a then mostly-unknown Frank Frazetta. The cover depicts a man dressed as a park ranger thrusting a defensive hand forward as a dozen different animal and spectral entities converged upon him. As a youngster in the early 1970s, UFOs and Bigfoot and swamp monsters and lake monsters were just COOL! And I still harbor an interest in those subjects today, though with a healthy dose of scientific rationalist skepticism.
Quick autobiographical sideline: when I was growing up in far northeast Texas, on the border with Arkansas and Louisiana, there was a genuine monster scare in nearby Fouke, Arkansas. This hairy apparition was named the Fouke Monster, and generated a ton of buzz in the surrounding communities. It seemed to be a cross between Bigfoot and some sort of swamp thing, and it scared the hell out of a lot of folks and thrilled all the kids in the area. This is a big part of why I got caught up in studying oddball subjects like UFOs and other assorted paranormal creepies. Check out some of the Fouke Monster videos on YouTube for more information.
So anyway, this book by the well-known monster and UFO chaser John Keel was my introduction to this alternate world sometime around the age of ten. I read it with thrills and intense belief back then, and I was glad to find a reasonably well-kept copy on AbeBooks. Re-reading it now gave me an intense satisfaction and a feeling of nostalgia. And I was kind of surprised at just how good this book was for its time. Keel spends a lot of effort recounting various reports of different types of physical and paranormal events spanning most of the US and various other countries. Tons of phenomena are covered: UFOs, Bigfoot, swamp things, giants from the past, the mysterious Grinning Man, the even more mysterious Mothman of West Virginia, lake and sea monsters, demon dogs and phantom cats, and various other creepy crawlies, including the Men in Black. Keel collects eyewitness accounts and various newspaper and journal reports to collate a storehouse of information on these apparitions. To his credit, he sourced these accounts well. An internet search uncovered corroborating information on every case that I looked up. It’s obvious that Keel was interested in getting a clear picture of what was going on in each of these cases.
Furthermore, Keel is not content to submit to obvious explanations for the various creatures and events covered in the book. In point of fact, he espouses a similar theory to the ideas presented by the prominent computer scientist and UFO investigator Jacques Vallee. Vallee and Keel both began their careers treating UFOs in what was the tradition of the day, that UFOs were actual mechanical craft piloted by extraterrestrial beings or robots. By the late '60s and early '70s though, Vallee and Keel had both come to the conclusion that UFOs and other phenomena were closely linked with legends from the past. The leprechauns and demons of yore had simply taken on a space-age visage as the industrial revolution revised and shattered many religious and folk tales and traditions from the past. Both men espoused a viewpoint that esoteric activities were largely not physical entities at all, but part of a shared experiential consciousness that had been largely unexplored. Both investigators were open to the idea that this consciousness might not be an internal one, but one that was “projected” into our reality from another dimension, an “unseen reality” that directly affected ours on a conscious and/or unconscious level. Those ideas were revolutionary in the early 1970s, and led to a big split within the various paranormal communities. That split continues to this day, though mostly within the UFO community.
Keel even does an early take on sleep paralysis and how that particular phenomenon links to the modern understanding of “demon encounters” and UFO contactee cases. That part of the mystery interests me in particular, since I personally know several people who either currently suffer or have suffered in the past from sleep paralysis and its signature feelings of helplessness and a feeling that they are not alone in their own houses.
One particularly funny side note: Keel differentiates the standard Bigfoot encounters from accounts of swamp things. As such, he dubs his swampy apparitions as Abominable Swamp Slobs, or A.S.S. for short. I couldn’t tell if he was serious with this nomenclature, or if he found it to be a funny “in-joke” or a secret critique of the accounts themselves. Either way, I found it hilarious and a particular highlight of the book.
Overall, I give it a solid 4 stars. Keel spends some time on badly sourced rumors and accounts, even though most of his accounts checked out on internet searches. I was also disappointed with the swamp monster chapter, which devolved into yet more Bigfoot encounters. I think better editing could have kept Keel on track with his subjects. I DID particularly like the chapter on The Great Sea Serpent of Silver Lake, New York, which stands as one of the all-time great hoaxes ever perpetrated on monster hunters. Seek out this book if you have any interest in the paranormal at all. It’s a lost classic that needs to see more of the light of day. I thank John Keel for opening me up to a world of adventure and possibility and the need to keep an open mind. Well done, Mr. Keel, well done. 1892062372 All I can say is you've got to read it to appreciate it. A compilation of odd and/or strange creatures told of throughout the world. You'll only get a beginning view of Keel's odd understanding/theory about paranormal events and creatures here.
Update:
I was real into strange but true type books when I was younger. From the '60s on I snapped them up as they came out. I read everything from Charles Fort to Frank Edwards. Then later (the 1970s) I came on John A.Keel's books.
If you've seen the movie The Mothman Prophecies it's based on a book by Mr. Keel. The Mothman Prophecies. The book came out in '75 and was originally titled Visitors From Space: The Astonishing True Story Of The Mothman Prophecies.
I recall the Silver Bridge collapse and that sort of tied things in personally.
Throughout Mr. Keel's books he puts together a rather convoluted theory of how all the sightings of strange phenomena from Big Foot to Flying Saucers are connected.
I don't buy into it but in my early 20s it was interesting. You may be able to track some of the books down if it interests you.
Have fun. 1892062372 Yes. Delightful. Is this book totally cuckoo bananas with little basis in scientifically verifiable fact? Probably. Is it also inexplicably engaging and fun and did it make me worry a psychological projection of a sasquatch would be glaring in my window at three a.m.? Yes! Think of it as fiction (this has GOT to be part of the inspiration for Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space') and enjoy the ride. 1892062372
